kdenetwork/kmail

[Aaron J. Seigo]

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On Wednesday 18 September 2002 05:07, Marc Mutz wrote:
> Everybody seemed to agree he should be doing the job. There was no
> disconcert about that that I know of - except for Don.

to be fair, i did indeed voice concerns about how kmail development has been 
managed from the perspective of a non-core KMail developer who does 
contribute to that project, and i believe there were those who agreed with 
me. i don't care if michael remains the maintainer of kmail or not and would 
be as happy as ever if he stayed on, but it isn't true that Don is the only 
one who feels that kmail devel could be handled differently to the betterment 
of the project.

> > For the longer term (3.2) I am really looking forward to a change to
> > the ueber-conservative route that KMail has taken the last few
> > releases. Here Don's make_it_cool branch is looking incredibly
> > exciting.
>
> Suddenly everyone comes 'round the corner and tells you what a fucking
> bullshit you have produced for the last few releases. Nice. :-(

i don't think that was what he was saying. kmail's devel has been conservative 
to keep stability high while adding some fundamental features (such as IMAP).
on the up-side, this has created a nice, stable piece of software that works 
well for many.

but life has trade-offs, and in this case the trade-offs include a pattern of 
development that is at times excruciatingly slow and overbearingly dominated  
by a select few individuals. patches have been ignored, needed features are 
slow to arrive, contributors have been discouraged, and it has resulted in a 
body of code that is in serious need of refactoring. 

while make_it_cool is atempting to address these challenges, it doesn't mean 
that the kmail in HEAD is a steaming pile of shit, just that perhaps it is 
the right time for development to take a different path. in this case that 
means a slightly more cavalier attitude towards short-term stability in order 
to tune the entire code base for current and future needs.

perhaps when this is done it will be time again to return to a more 
conservative approach.

> I know the KMail developers are considered a curious bunch of bastards
> in some corners of the KDE universe, thanks for reminding me.

let me get the violins for you ;-P

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo, curious bastard
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"
    - Albert Einstein
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